School ties

Reviving John Robin Baitz's The Film Society

by Carolyn Clay

by Jon Robin Baitz. Directed by Roger Rees. Set designed by Neil Patel. Costumes by Willa Kim. Lighting by Frances Aronson. Sound by Kurt Kellenberger. With John Benjamin Hickey, Tom Bloom, Denis Holmes, Cherry Jones, David Aaron Baker, and Carole Shelley. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival through July 6.

The protagonist of Jon Robin Baitz's The Film Society is caught in a compromising situation -- though not the type that inspires Alan Ayckbourn and Georges Feydeau plays. As affably played by John Benjamin Hickey, Jonathon Balton is a flaky, ineffectual teacher in a rotting upper-crusty boys' school in Durban, South Africa; it is the same school he attended as an upper-crusty boy. The time is 1970, and comfortable white-supremacy, as represented by the Blenheim School, is starting to crumble -- though, as we now know, the death of apartheid will be a lingering and brutal one. In the course of Baitz's play, which was written in 1985, Balton must choose between being a righteous cog in what will be the new Africa and clinging to the power and privilege of his boyhood even as it evaporates. Ironically, he gains strength even as he loses moral ground.

The Film Society is an intelligent and troubling play, if a somewhat awkward one. And it announces Baitz -- who lived in South Africa as a boy and went on to write The Substance of Fire (recently released as a film), Three Hotels, The End of the Day, and the much-praised A Fair Country -- as an eloquent, morally earnest dramatist who at this point in his development hadn't learned to steer potent material in a clear direction. The end of the play, in particular, brings the audience up short. But there is some fine, urgent writing, especially in the second act. And Roger Rees's stylized, well-acted Williamstown revival -- for which Baitz was on the scene to do some rewriting -- underlines the work's juxtaposition of numbing insularity and social context.

As the play begins, a characteristically "radical" act by Balton's plantation-boyhood buddy (both are from big sugar-cane money) and fellow teacher, Terry Sinclair, has caused what Balton calls "a storm in a tea-thingy." Put in charge of festivities for the school's Centenary Day, Sinclair invited a black minister to speak; the police were called, and a number of old-line parents and faculty are up in arms. The minister later dies in police custody, Sinclair is fired, and his teacher-wife, Nan, finds her position also jeopardized. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical Balton -- whose only previous action has been to run the school's film society -- is about to be made assistant headmaster and then headmaster, as long as he makes the required compromises. This is so his wealthy mom (a snazzy Carole Shelley) will pull the school out of a deep, not to mention metaphoric, financial hole. The first "condition" imposed on Balton involves the film society.

At Williamstown, the set is a rounded hall into whose molding names like "Wellington" and "Livingstone" have been carved. This "clean, English sort of Africa" is fronted, however, by a beachfront strewn with planks, tires, and other detritus. As the play progresses, cracks and then large openings appear in the structure to reveal patterns suggestive of African folk art. The between-scene music, too, becomes increasingly African. Clearly, outside this increasingly disheveled cocoon of brute colonial privilege, Africa is on the move. But not even the "progressive" Sinclair can figure a way to connect Blenheim to the rest of the world. And for the play's most reactionary character, dying assistant headmaster Hamish Fox (Tom Bloom), the "trouble with Africa" is spreading down the continent "like cancer down my spine."

In the play's most powerful scene, the politically correct but suddenly unemployed Sinclair -- volatilely played by David Aaron Baker as a roiling mix of preppiness and anger -- must admit to his wife -- Cherry Jones, her ART-ingenue sheen more burnished now but no less rich -- that for all his radical posturings, what he really wants is to remain safely ensconced in the womb of Blenheim. He has played at politics as he played at cricket. Later, Jones's Nan has a quiet but powerful monologue, an address to students who have penned kneejerk essays about the Zulus brimming with drums and spears, in which she describes her family's treatment of an African household servant who, separated from her own family, became "sour," her humanness "like meat left out too long." "The real Africa," Nan opines, is possessed by a violence that has nothing to do with guns and spears: "We have our own brand of callousness."

Indeed, toughness has earlier been lauded as a thing Blenheim boys need to learn. Balton, the play's central if not its most compelling character, eventually does -- though, from a dramatic standpoint, he seems rather too quick a study, segueing from a childhood reminiscence of Christmas cow killing to a sudden conviction that the old ways of the jungle are best. Still, The Film Society is a worthwhile play, not so dated as you might think, since it's about personal survival and moral compromise more than it's about South Africa. Produced in New York in 1986, it deserves this second screening.

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